Young Charmian left home for Sydney, met writer George Johnston in Melbourne. They moved to Hydra, befriending Leonard C | dG1fSnRMN0kzRjdQUjQ
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Short filmTranscript
00:00My ambitions, as I said, were very large.
00:03I wanted to do something better than anyone else could do.
00:06Charmian definitely did what many of us would like to have done, but didn't dare.
00:11She was a troublemaker. She was a stirrer.
00:16She was innately an observer, a questioner, an activist.
00:22She took an axe to the ice and hard. She was going to smash it open.
00:27Most of all, she was a bloody good writer, a really good writer.
00:32She saw George Johnston. They both fall passionately in love.
00:38And so they decided in one fell swoop to move to Eithre.
00:43Those wonderful young, free people sitting in that circle.
00:48And you just want to be there.
00:51She wrote so exquisitely about what it was like to be a woman.
00:58Yes, that is how I feel.
01:02She was one of the first women's voices of a mother and a wife, but also a traveller.
01:08There was no other Australian writer writing quite that book.
01:13We know that George helped himself from her travel notebooks.
01:18And George had had a triumphant publication.
01:22It was as if Charmian was left behind.
01:26I should imagine that it was very hurtful.
01:30You could hear things breaking and plates being smashed and thinking,
01:33my God, one of them's going to kill the other.
01:35She had been worried about this thing.
01:37Completely unsuspecting of what it was that he was going to say.
01:41What this thing was, we shall never know.